


so are you to me

by strikinglight



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Developing Relationship, Epistolary, F/M, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route, Flashbacks, Grief/Mourning, Healers, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2020-12-24 18:47:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 19,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21104249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: It is more winter than spring, still, when Dimitri meets the daughter of Margrave Edmund. Her eyes, he discovers that first ashen-faced evening, are grey.A correspondence.





	1. as the music at the banquet

**Author's Note:**

> I already had a lot of feelings about Marianne, so she was among my top recruitment priorities playing Blue Lions route, and as I was thumbing through her supports I noticed she had one with Dimitri and it sparked a very "hmm, what is This" sort of curiosity in me, and then I tripped over my own feelings and fell down a rabbithole, as you can well imagine.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who read this over for me and assured me it was Going Somewhere, especially Ceece, Allie, and Ewa. Special thanks to everyone who roasts me on the regular by sending me whatever scraps of Dimari content they stumble upon, most especially [the dove shitpost](https://twitter.com/fe3hmeme/status/1184238652303560704?s=21) which I received no less than five times from five separate friends. ILY all.
> 
> [Title.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N9eoySoM-E)

_Those of us who think we know_  
_the same secrets_  
_are silent together most of the time_

_— Stephen Dunn, "Those of Us Who Think We Know"_

* * *

> Dear Marianne,
> 
> I hope it does not come as a surprise to see yourself addressed so familiarly in a letter perhaps better meant for your adoptive father. Or at the very least that the surprise is a happy thing, as it had been for me to see your seal alongside his on the trade agreement. I thought I might have recognized that deft hand, even before my eye made it all the way down the page, and by the end of it I knew that I must write you directly, if only to wish you well.
> 
> I have not had the chance to pay my respects to the seas of east Fódlan since our battle at Derdriu—it will be two years ago now, not so long ago as all that, but I find I cannot recall much by way of beautiful things we must have seen there. Very little, truthfully, besides the empty harbor, and the blue horizon descending into the water. War colors everything, but I do remember those blues. I should like to visit Edmund Greatport someday, and look at it all again with clearer eyes.
> 
> Lest you think this idle flattery, I will tell you that the sea that borders Faerghus along the northern coast looks like iron, as do the mountains, as does the sky well into springtime. There is an austerity about the colors here. The wind is bracing, the paths rough, and it is long before the meadows bloom. Make no mistake, I have loved it all from the day I was born, as fiercely as I have known how to love anything, but it has done me well, I think, to look beyond what I know, and to reach. It appears to me that you have been doing the same. It makes me wonder what you have seen, out in the wide world, since last we spoke.
> 
> Forgive me if this letter comes out of turn, and if it is too strange an experience to hear someone who has been so remote for so long speaking to you as a friend then I urge you not to feel compelled to reply. I admit I’ve been remiss in keeping people close; even among our old comrades in the capital, it’s proven increasingly difficult over the past year to stay consistently abreast of their doings. I don’t seek to absolve myself by invoking my duties or my position, and perhaps what we lived through is likewise best consigned to the past—but please know that I do think of you. When the children sing the hymns in the cathedral at the turning of the seasons, especially, I think of you.
> 
> May all your days be safe and happy. Should you wish it, I remain your friend,  
Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd

* * *

It is more winter than spring, still, when Dimitri meets the daughter of Margrave Edmund. Her eyes, he discovers that first ashen-faced evening, are grey.

The new year is less than a fortnight old, and between classes and chores and the various rites of spring there are to prepare for it already feels like they never have enough time. Like the very stones of the monastery urge them to keep moving, lest the cold get under their skin. The first skill Dimitri has learned with any degree of mastery is how to rise with the dawn bells, just ahead of the sun. The second is how to lie still after the lamps go out, quieting a mind and a body still abuzz from whatever tasks had filled the hours between, listening to the desire thrumming restless between his bones_. _Waiting for it to ebb, and then for the darkness to close in.

Dimitri’s arms are sore from an afternoon of lance practice, his hands raw, the back of his throat itching slightly with what Dedue suspects are the beginnings of a cold. Professor Manuela is motioning a haphazardly handpicked gaggle of twenty students through evening choir, bantering back and forth with two of the Black Eagles girls as she warms up on the organ. The girl stands to one side of the group with her head bowed, a pocket of quiet in a whirlpool of only vaguely familiar faces.

It’s impossible, at first, to see her eyes. She only lifts them when Dimitri draws near—grey, and round, and so visibly startled he feels a stab of contrition prick him between the ribs from nowhere.

“May I stand behind you?” A second prick wrings out something resembling an explanation. “Professor Manuela says the baritone section goes on the rear left-hand side.”

The girl bites her lip, as though it’s a shock even to have been asked. Seconds later she’s already cast her gaze down again, toward the tiles. “Certainly.”

She doesn’t smile. When she turns her head a coil of hair escapes her braided bun to curl anxiously against the curve of one cheek. Dimitri thinks, from nowhere, of how white the sky had been above the training yard this afternoon, as if it had still been holding on to some snow. Back home in Fhirdiad, the thaws will not have started yet.

He opens his mouth to say more—_thank you, _perhaps, or _I’m sorry—_but Manuela plays a chord on the organ and the lines close in, and he’s shuffled into his place behind her near against his will. They practice their hymns for the next ninety minutes, fumbling through the harmonies on “Like Cedars They Shall Stand.” The girl’s shoulders, dropped so low and rounded so self-protectively in, straighten up as she sings.

He does not find out until afterward that she is Margrave Edmund’s daughter. It’s Claude who tells him this, after the choir has dispersed and the two of them are stowing the sheet music and the hymnals in the back room. The girl had been the first to leave, receding soundlessly as a shadow from between the rows before the echoes of the organ’s last note had even fully faded, arms wrapped around herself and head ducked down. She had not said a single word more, to him or to anyone.

Marianne von Edmund. Dimitri commits the syllables to memory, along with the sound of her voice, which he had had to struggle to pick out—the tremulous thread of it, hiding itself behind all the others. _The just shall grow as tall as palms, like cedars they shall stand…_

“To be honest, that’s about all I know about her,” says Claude, shrugging as he shuffles Manuela’s papers into a drawer. He had thumbed through the stack twice after she handed them to him, to make sure all the pages were in order, and then to make twice as sure. “Marianne doesn’t tend to talk much, even to us.” This makes him smile a little, for some reason—eyes bright, mouth tilted wryly as though this Marianne’s reticence is some mystery that he is taking especial pleasure in watching unravel, or some joke whose punchline is lost on everyone else. “No offense, Your Princeliness, but I’m surprised she said a word to you.”

Dimitri, halfway through shelving the hymnals at the back of the room—middle row, above the children’s prayer-books, below the missals and the other books of ritual—decides against asking what Claude means by that. Nine times out of ten it’s a fool’s errand, anyway, to ask Claude what he means; to do so is to show him an opening in one’s armor, lay a weakness bare. Besides, he had understood Marianne’s eyes well enough.

“I might have bothered her,” he sighs. “I probably shouldn’t have said anything. Give her my apologies, would you?”

At that Claude lets out a laugh, loud and brief and ringing, echoing around the windowless room. “Hey, come on now. I don’t think you could ever bother anyone.” He crosses the floor in two steps, pushing a book into Dimitri’s hands that he must have missed earlier. “Here’s the last of ‘em.”

This hymnal is smaller and thicker than the others, and bound in well-worn black leather in lieu of the monastery’s standard dark green. The pages have faded from age and what appears to be frequent use, a number of them dog-eared at the corners, the paper yellowing. Dimitri holds onto it after Claude leaves, dawdling at the bookcase, reluctant to place it where he isn’t certain it belongs.

The dinner bell will be ringing any minute now, and it must be full dark outside or nearly, from the chill that’s begun to seep in through the stones. If the book belongs to someone and they simply left it behind after choir practice, it will be easy enough to—

“P-pardon me.”

Dimitri lifts his head so quickly the muscles at the back of his neck twinge in protest. He can’t quite school his expression when he sees Marianne there, framed in the doorway; it’s a mercy, albeit a slightly perverse one, that her eyes are not on his face but on the hymnal in his hand.

His arm moves on its own, animated by some deeply buried instinct toward self-preservation, extending the book toward her. That same instinct must be what moves him to ask, in a voice that sounds, to his own ears, distant and somewhat disembodied, “Does this belong to you?”

“Yes, it’s my fault, I forgot it after…” The rest of the sentence seems to vanish as she takes the book from him. She bites her lip again, her free hand worrying at her skirt, smoothing away nonexistent wrinkles. She wears it long, Dimitri notes, past the knees. He wonders if she gets cold easily. “Thank you for holding on to it for me, um…”

Her voice seems to tilt upward at the end, an unsaid question lingering. He does not offer any of his other names, figuring the one closest to him suffices.

“Dimitri.”

She nods, mouths the syllables: _Dimitri_. What follows is something in the vague shape of a “thank you,” her upper body wilting down into a half-bow—and then, so softly her lips barely move, “M-my name is—”

“Marianne von Edmund,” he finishes for her on an outgoing breath, an impulse his mind is too slow to arrest, even as he recognizes his mistake.

From the tower overhead, Dimitri can hear the evening bells beginning to ring, to signal the lighting of the lamps. Farther off, the patter of running feet, voices calling on the path to the dining hall. Marianne stares at him, wide-eyed, her entire body tensed as though for flight.

“Forgive my rudeness, it’s just that I—” He stops himself this time, casts around for some explanation, some safe and reasonable arrangement of words. “Your house leader told me your name.”

It occurs to him only afterward that this is a less than satisfactory explanation, one house leader seeking her name from another for reasons unknown. He only briefly considers hitting his head against the wall, vetoes it on the grounds that it would only frighten her further. Instead he stands still and watches Marianne’s face settle into an inscrutable expression, the anxiety in her eyes colored with something else now—a faint glimmer, at once curious and sad.

“Dimitri,” she says again slowly, with great care, as though she’s holding a delicate thing. A feather, or a sewing needle. No one has ever said his name that way before. “Thank you.”

She still doesn’t smile. The hand gripping the hymnal is white at the fingertips.

“I, um. I have to go.”

“Of course,” he says. Never mind that there is, likewise, no reason for him to stay here; it seems only logical now to linger an extra ten minutes in the emptying cathedral, if only to spare Marianne von Edmund the need to fret about being followed by odd strangers.

She goes, stepping back through the doorway and out of sight. The footsteps that carry her away make no noise across the tiled floor, no matter how closely he listens.

* * *

> How wonderful to hear that you are not only well, but thriving—and especially that you have not lost your love for horses, and that you have chances aplenty nowadays to encounter them outside of combat. Your mare Lissi sounds like a beauty, and like she will make a dear companion besides; I wait eagerly for tales of the adventures you embark on together, should you ever wish to share them.
> 
> Here, too, the mares have been in foal. We welcomed two new ones just a fortnight ago, with the first of the summer crops—a colt and a filly, piebald and white. Ingrid will name and train them, a year from now. She did not say as much to me, not in so many words, but I can already tell there are few things that will be able to tear her away from them, when the time comes. Nor will I blame her in the slightest; as a boy one of my most flagrant acts of disobedience was sneaking into the stables the night my stepmother’s favorite was due to deliver. I fell asleep in a pile of straw at the back of her stall and woke up before dawn to the sight of a four-legged beast standing over me, all warm breath and knobby legs, already fully formed and ready to run.
> 
> The horses of Faerghus are not so elegant as your Lissi, I think, or your old friend Dorte of years past—not so fine-boned, but clear-eyed and hardy, and their coats grow long and warm in the wintertime. They are not racers by instinct, but keep sure footing across long distances and rough terrain. Which is to say, they have many charms of their own, which I’m certain you’d appreciate.
> 
> You are kind to ask about my duties. I have been something of a caged bird this past season, supervising the spring planting and reviewing trade policy, among other affairs of state I won’t bore you by detailing. At midsummer I may travel due south, through what had once been Empire territory, to visit with the lords there and inspect things in person, and I’ll embrace the opportunity to be out under less familiar skies. Meantime, I hold court, and write to you, and wait.
> 
> My father used to say the head that wears the crown rests uneasy all its days. I feel I understand what he meant now, a little better than I once did. As a boy I could hardly imagine begrudging the kingdom anything, not even my peace of mind. I don’t mean to say now, of course, that I begrudge it anything. I mean only that even in times of peace such as we have now, moments of quiet are rare and precious, and I always long for them, finding them gone too soon.
> 
> Still, even in this I find I am luckier than most, for how easily a letter from you can cure that longing. I only hope this correspondence has brought you a smile or two in return, in exchange for the gift of quiet—a gift that you may not even know you have given, to one who so frequently does not realize his good fortune until he finds proof of it in his hands.
> 
> The most trying thing about being king by far is feeling yourself so far from the ground. I have had much time of late to think about what kind of king I would like to be, and most days my prayer is that my feet never leave the earth. The earth, after all, is where I might meet people face to face—hear their voices and see the youngest of our horses at play in the pasture, and take up pen and paper to write of all of it, to a friend far away.

* * *

Marianne von Edmund loves horses. Dimitri learns the fact of this when she joins the Blue Lions at the cusp of summer, ostensibly to improve her riding. He does not truly know it until he finds her up late one night drawing water from the well for a sick horse, bent nearly double with both hands around the bucket handle, a lantern on the ground. She’s in her work clothes, breeches and a loose homespun shirt, and her hair is braided down one side of her neck.

“I’m sorry,” he says, instead of announcing himself. Marianne straightens up at the sound of his voice, her long plait swaying against her shoulder, damp at the end from where it must have dipped into the bucket. There’s a white washcloth draped over her opposite shoulder, folded neatly lengthwise. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

“Your Highness,” she murmurs, stalling around the formal term of address, a pair of words as good as foreign. Her gaze travels uncertainly from the bucket by her side, to his face, to the bucket again. “I couldn’t possibly—”

“Oh, Marianne, not you too.” The protest slips out of him almost plaintively, just shy of a plea—_will you call me by my name again_—and he finds there’s little he can do to mask it besides clear his throat, shamefaced. He can only guess which of the others she might have picked up the habit from; Annette, probably, or Ashe. Those two in all their earnestness had orbited her like a pair of wheeling falcons, her first month with them. Always wanting to see to her comfort, always wanting to know her more. And who can blame them? “I promise you, I would welcome the chance to have something to do.”

Marianne thinks on this a moment, tugging at the end of her braid, fingers worrying at the loose strands. Her hair seems to have a mind of its own, for all she keeps it so resolutely bound, parts of it always somehow escaping. Dimitri wonders for a moment how it would look set free—closes the lid on that thought, firmly, lest his traitorous mouth fail him again.

“It’s after midnight,” she says, finally, and he’s aware that she could just as easily have asked what he was doing out walking so late. He doesn’t think he would lie to her, if she ever asked, but also that it would not be like her to make someone talk about the dark things that sometimes pushed them awake at odd hours, the omission in its own way a kindness.

“I never sleep much,” says Dimitri. He tries for a lightness and misses the mark somewhat, so that the words come out hollow. The sound of his own voice compels him to add, for no reason he can discern, “Unless I’m exhausted.”

She nods once, still hesitating, but something in her gaze has shifted enough for Dimitri to glimpse it in the low light—some bright shard of understanding that had not been there before. “Will you take the water? It’s my—my friend, Dorte.”

The bucket is cold—bespelled —when Dimitri touches it, and full nearly to the brim. The water in it sloshes quietly from side to side as he follows Marianne into the stables, to the end stall, where a grey gelding lies on its side. When she hangs her lantern on a hook and takes the washcloth from her shoulder, she gestures to the floor. Dimitri sets the bucket down.

Four moons now he’s known Marianne and yet he’s still casting about for things to say to her beyond the niceties, still fumbling to account for the things he knows about her beyond what sits closest to the surface. Marianne spends most of her free time at prayer in the cathedral. Marianne wishes to improve her riding. She prefers to sit at the end of the table at mealtimes, so as to have open space on at least one side, and now and again she will speak in a hushed voice to the professor and to Mercedes, but otherwise she tends to say nothing unless spoken to. There seems at all times to be a part of her that holds others at arm’s length. That she is letting him help her now, the two of them and her sick horse seemingly suspended in a warm, humid midnight outside of time, feels somewhat unreal, a vision cut out of an especially absurd dream.

“What…” he starts to ask, gesturing at the horse—Dorte, was it? Her friend Dorte. The first living creature he’s heard her claim as one of her own.

“You could, um. Let him put his head in your lap.”

Dimitri blinks, down on one knee in the straw. “Beg pardon?”

“It helps him stay calm,” she tells him. The hand holding the washcloth dips wrist-deep into the cold water. Dorte continues to lie unmoving, but his eyes are open now, watching them. “I gave him herbs this evening, but he still feels too warm. He's been very uncomfortable.”

Dimitri obeys, settling cross-legged on the ground by Dorte’s head. He noses into Dimitri’s lap readily enough, though his movements are sluggish with fever, his breathing labored in a way that Dimitri is certain would pull at any recalcitrant heart. “Is it the rain that’s made him ill?”

“The damp, yes, I suppose,” says Marianne. She too is on her knees now, wiping Dorte’s neck and back down. “The grooms told me not to worry about watching him, but I couldn’t—rest well. I kept thinking about…” She lets the sentence hang, hands pausing their slow circles in the silence that descends, suddenly, without warning. Then she sighs, little more than a restrained breath; it barely parts her lips, as if she’s afraid of disturbing the air. “It can be hard to tell, with animals. How much to worry.”

“Well, he’s certainly lucky to have such a devoted caretaker.” She angles her face toward him, brow furrowing, and it takes all his restraint not to throw up his hands right then and there in surrender. “I mean it, Marianne. Sincerely.”

He isn’t certain she believes him, but she opts to return to her work rather than argue. He watches her, idly stroking Dorte between the ears, and waits. The flame in the lantern hanging overhead shifts and dances, throws so many fluttering shadows across the side of her face that he can see.

When she speaks again it’s in a whisper, addressed to no one. “I’m… not much good at anything, I don’t think. I just try to make myself useful where I can.”

He’s brought up short, then, by the memory of being healed by her after a skirmish in one of the villages due west of Zanado, weeks ago—of the long, shallow cut down the length of his arm, the yellow light between her hands searing the wound closed. The frown she wears now is not so different from the expression that had lain like a mask over her face then, tight and stricken and shuttered-up, as though she was preparing to take the hurt into her own body. He remembers bits and pieces of a stilted conversation in the cathedral the day after, something about putting people in danger, something about absolution. How she had prayed that day, on her knees for an hour.

“It takes its own kind of courage,” he tells her, with gentle insistence, because it’s true, and to his mind it bears saying. But all at once their conversation feels suddenly made of glass—some pale and brittle thing he should know better than to trust his clumsy hands with. He has never done well with breakable things; he has always had too much of a talent for uncovering their sharp edges, and yet— “Healing, and caring. Not anyone can do it.”

“Perhaps,” she whispers, eyes down, as if looking at him would mean having to account for why she does not believe. Her hands continue in the same steady rhythm, proceeding through this work of healing she seems to think so little of. “I just… I cause trouble for everyone. I always have, since I was young, so I have to find ways—to make up for it, somehow.”

There is no end to the empty, consoling things Dimitri knows he can tell her, if he chooses. Courtesies he’s been trained to, promises of _better _already rising to mind, easily. In the end, he does not say them. Somehow it feels like she’s heard them all, and then some—and so he sits, cradling her only friend’s head in his lap, listening as the restless night closes in to fill the silence. Dorte breathing, warm and weighty against his knee, and the horses in the next stalls over snuffling and huffing in their sleep, and the nightjar calling on the wing between the trees outside, always calling.

* * *

> Ashe is newly returned from Garreg Mach this moon, and though it’s embarrassing to confess this to you I have been well near beside myself with envy to hear him talk about how changed it is, and about his visits with the professor (that is, the archbishop, with whom I do correspond often, but not in nearly so familiar a capacity)—and about seeing you, naturally. When he handed your last letter to me with his own hands, odd as it must sound, I felt briefly as though you were in the room with us—or that I had been with you there, walking the halls of the monastery, as I know I should have been.
> 
> Such scoldings as I’ve received for my absence in the weeks since, from every friend of ours, both in writing and face to face, and I know I’ll only come home to more. That you have elected not to scold me is charity I don’t deserve, and I know it. How I know it.
> 
> If I might speak plain to you, however, it’s quite bizarre to imagine we are already being taught as history, even more so that mock battles are being fought in our name. I’ve heard the joke more than once that we must be a most unfortunate generation to be passing into legend while we are many of us still alive, and therefore unprotected from the embarrassment of seeing it happen. Maybe that’s a small price to pay, for the peace these children now enjoy. Do you remember our feast, after the Battle of the Eagle and Lion? Sometimes I have only to close my eyes and I can see it unfolding in front of me again, clearer than the day, all of us crossing the tables in the great hall. It’s wonderful to think that now the students there can dine with whomever they please, can learn with whomever they please, that the walls that divide them are not so impregnable as they often seemed when we were students there. I welcome the notion that this too is the world we are each in our own way helping to build, bit by bit.
> 
> When I think of the war now—of what we fought for, and what it cost us—it seems to me that there is at once too little and too much to tell. So little that words outrun it, so much that words diminish it. I suppose that is the nature of living through tumultuous times. You emerge from them indelibly changed, into a changed world, and even years later you may find you are still discovering the differences.
> 
> I do not imagine that we changed this world so much as it is now reshaping itself in places around the work we have done. Who’s to say if it’s enough? A question, I suppose, for those who might write and speak of us when we are truly history.
> 
> Both you and I are traveling through the coming season, it would seem; I write to you now on the road through Hevring lands. We sail for Brigid in the morning, on what is for all intents and purposes an official diplomatic visit, but the truth is that their queen has written me asking if I might help her knights improve their horsemanship, and their lance skills besides. She says she will make it up to me by taking me on a hunt—and while I would never have dreamed of refusing Petra anything to start with, the opportunity to run under the trees again, side by side with a friend, is the sweetest reward. I will take care to remember every leaf, and after I will tell you about it all.
> 
> Does it not surprise you at times to think about how far we have all come, how spread out we are now across the continent? I feel lucky enough that some of us can cross paths on occasion, but now and then I do dream of gathering under one roof again, like we used to, back when we were younger and our foremost duties were to ourselves and each other. What a delight that would be, if it could ever be real and not a dream—to be all together again and see what the years have made of us. I do not promise lightly, Marianne, but should another such chance come, you have my word that I won’t disappoint a second time. I will be there to greet you, ahead of all the rest.
> 
> If my rider goes swiftly enough, this letter will reach you at House Goneril, before you depart across the border into Almyra. I pray the roads will be gentle as you go, and the skies clear.

* * *

“Dimitri,” says Marianne, “you’re favoring your left leg.”

She’s walking on his right, one hand on the flank of one of the convoy’s packhorses, and his mind is in so many places at once that he has to strain to hear her. Part of it has already departed his body and sped back to the monastery. Part of it is lost in the clouds somewhere above, watching the armies break ranks as they depart Gronder Field. For a moment it’s easy to lose himself in imagining how they must all look, the lines dissolving until they run together in a single shapeless mass, all formation forgotten or willfully abandoned. The wild geese overhead have more discipline, fanning out on the wing as they cross a sky that looks like fire.

The trees that line the road, too, are golden and washed over with red in the dusk. This is the sort of day when the whole world looks like fire—the pure and blazing center of autumn, untouched by winter and summer both.

Then, returning to earth, he inclines his head toward Marianne. “You acquitted yourself admirably today.”

“I did nothing. I was mostly just in the way.” There’s no gloom about the way she says this, for once, only briskness. “Dimitri, your leg.”

He is indeed favoring his left leg. In truth, this is part of the reason he had fallen in with the rear guard in the first place; they had been walking home, en masse like this, and the ache had crept up his right knee, and his steps had slowed on their own without him needing to think about it. He’d dropped backward through the ranks, largely unnoticed, until he found himself at her side.

“It’s nothing. A pulled muscle.” Dimitri had planted a foot badly, in his haste to throw his last javelin; that javelin had taken Raphael square in the chest and bounced right off, and it had taken a moment to realize, watching him fall backward into the waiting arms of his battalion, that they’d both been laughing. “The fault is all mine; I have a bad habit of overextending.”

“If you were in pain, you might have said so earlier.” Marianne’s eyes are on the road. They stay there as she speaks, too quiet to be truly reproachful, and yet—

“I wasn’t in pain, though,” says Dimitri, and it’s the truth. He had forgotten the pain—all of it, until after. “At least not at first. I tend not to feel much, in the thick of the fighting—even now, it only aches a little.”

The road begins to wind uphill, and he slows his steps, not quite limping, all his attention now leveled on that ache. She matches this new pace easily, without looking.

“Hurt or no hurt,” Marianne murmurs, “If you keep using it unchecked, the damage will only spread.”

“You’re right, of course,” he says. “I’m sorry to have troubled you. I wanted only to spare you worry.”

The truth is that so much of this day has rushed by him, little more than a haze of color and noise and the wordless logic of moving muscles—the heft of the spear shaft in his hands, a quiver of javelins growing lighter with the hours, lighter. The blunted tip of the last one striking Raphael right above the heart, the blooming bruise, so much laughter they’d both found themselves breathless with it. Ashe playing dead on the ground, brown leaves and dried grass in his hair as Dedue lifted him up. The professor’s sword, raised high. A blue sky giving way to flame, delivering their victory.

Then there is Marianne, walking beside him. The braids around her head are coming softly undone, her hair now more out of them than in them, feathering down around her cheeks and over her shoulders.

“Maybe we all do,” she tells him. These words, like so many things he’s ever heard her say, land a little heavily—like stones she needs to test the weight of in her hands before she drops them into water, turning them over again and again. “Maybe we all trouble each other, in the end.”

He tests his own words in his mind before he says them, head tilted up toward the sky as they crest the hill. “Perhaps it’s part and parcel of being comrades. Or friends, even.”

The road that opens out below will lead them across the Airmid River, whose meandering course runs parallel to the horizon. From this distance, its waters are shining, rosy in the light of the ending day. Perhaps it’s nothing but his imagination getting away from him again, but Dimitri almost swears he can hear its voice reaching for them. All of them. Calling them all gently home.

“Marianne,” he says, softly, as they begin to descend, “may I trouble you for some help?”

She does not step closer to him, exactly. It’s simply that the road slopes, and she is there, and with only a flicker of hesitation he settles his hand on her shoulder and leans. She has always looked like such a delicate thing, liable to shatter in the wrong hands, but she does not bend under the weight.

“We’ll have Professor Manuela see to it later,” she says, “before the banquet. You can spare those few minutes, surely?”

Dimitri smiles at her then, ear to ear, unable to help it. “You drive a hard bargain, my friend. You will have to hold me to it—make certain I don’t get any foolish ideas.”

Here, now, in the midst of all of this—the road, and the bridge, and the rose-colored river, and the monastery they’re all going home to, little more than a shadow at the horizon’s edge—it feels as if they, too, are in the center of something. The battle is behind them, the night ahead with its promise of feasting and togetherness and every candle lit in the great hall, golden and alive.

(There hadn’t even been a plan, when the three of them had agreed upon it earlier. Only Claude grinning, one hand on Dimitri’s arm: _We’ll push the tables all together; it’ll be a party. _Only Edelgard’s smile—a small, stubborn, recalcitrant thing. Even she could not subdue it, in the end, no matter how hard she tried.)

When Marianne laughs, it is soundless—a little tremor that begins in her shoulders and disperses as soon as it appears, as though it’s been startled out of her. She breathes out softly after it’s gone, all the way, and yet some trace of it continues to linger around her lips and the corners of her eyes.

“I will,” she says.

_I will, _echoes Dimitri, silently, shaping the beginnings of a vow he does not know how to complete, just yet—knowing only that he is holding on to something he must promise. Something to swear by, on this day and every day to come. _I will—_

* * *

> Welcome home, Marianne. Hopefully this letter finds you somewhat settled again—wonderful as it has been to hear about your travels, my heart is warmest imagining you in your east-facing room, watching the sun come up over the harbor. I think often of what the sky must look like at your favorite hour of the morning, a radiant thing somewhere partway between golden and blue.
> 
> It gladdens me to hear that Lissi has the chance now to rest under a familiar roof after having accompanied you so faithfully, on so many journeys. You too have been resting well, I trust? You did say you were anticipating to come home to more work, and the year’s end is sure to be a busy time no matter where you go, but please do be sure to claim some hours for yourself, between organizing banquets and teaching new harmonies to your choir. Those mornings, at least. You ought to have that much.
> 
> In Faerghus, too, we have all sorts of festivities to bid farewell to the Blue Sea Star. People open all their doors that the old year’s ghosts might escape their homes more easily, and the new year’s blessings settle more readily in their places. There is feasting out in the streets of Fhirdiad, and dancing, everything lit with lanterns against the long night, and to be truthful the ball the nobles attend in the grand hall of the palace seems somehow the least exciting of any of it. Annette tells me that as a girl she used to sneak away and go cloaked and hooded among the children in the square, close to midnight, the better to see the fireworks. I wouldn’t put it past her to do so again, if she had not made me promise to dance with her no less than twice. Preferably three times.
> 
> The amount of effort that goes into planning a ball astounds me, do you know? Barely any of it is mine, I must confess; I feel all I’ve done is sit behind a table and taste dishes and say yea or nay, and the actual spectacle of it all will be the work of more capable hands. No more hours of folding paper flowers until our fingers blister, like we did at the Academy.
> 
> Do you remember the night of the ball, Marianne? Do you think on it from time to time, as I do? From where I am now standing, it feels as though that was the last time we were happy together, all of us, though none of us could have known it at the time. It aches a bit sharply, now, to look back and know it.
> 
> Perhaps this is my way of confessing a weakness to you, though it is one you may already know—I am, in many ways, still a man trapped in the past. You are almost my sole confidant in this, barring Dedue, to whom I tell everything, because he is neither the kind to condemn nor to offer advice, but simply listens, silent as the stones of the castle. I tell it to you because I believe you will understand it about me, as you have always understood so many of the most difficult things.
> 
> I have not been entirely honest with you. The truth is that as I am I can’t bear to return to Garreg Mach and see it restored, whole and beautiful, and already so much more than it was in the earliest, most glorious days. How strange it is now to imagine us all together there, years ago. How strange to realize that we can be haunted even by our greatest moments of peace and happiness. I am disarmed by it even now, as I write these words.
> 
> This sudden melancholy is unbecoming, I know. I’m aware that I have a duty to joy—to be joyful, that I might give others cause for joy. And to suggest that I have ever lacked for things to take joy in would not only be ungrateful but patently untrue. Tonight the streets will fill with music, and our friend Annette will claim a gift of at least three dances from me. I am alive now as I wait for evening to come, writing to you, surrounded by so much joy that it, too, becomes something to ache about. But possibly this too serves as an important honesty—that the ache is what tells me all of it is real.
> 
> One day soon I will outgrow my weakness, that you and I might visit Garreg Mach together, and see it and ourselves for what we have become. For now, Marianne, be warm and well in the coming winter. I carry your blessings with me wherever I go.

* * *

Marianne’s lap is full of roses. She’s been making them herself all day, out of translucent white paper, the petals cut and folded and held together with glue. When she is done with them—though who knows when that will be, after a hundred roses, after a thousand—they’ll become wreaths and garlands, to decorate the walls for the ball.

More than one person who’s passed by her little workstation in one corner of the great hall has remarked that it seems a thankless task; so much folding and cutting and tucking and pasting, and the paper she uses so fragile, so easy to tear. And yet it seems as though she could sit for hours, making roses bloom in winter and saying nothing to anyone—and she has been, and somehow she makes it look easy. Easier than cooking, easier than dance practice.

It’s in the way she bends her fingers, thinks Dimitri, from where he sits across her on the long bench. They appear to know what to do without her having to say.

His own attempts are much less pretty, to his chagrin, though this comes as no surprise. The failures litter the table, crumpled and misshapen, victims of his confusion or his impatience; he’d misjudged the strength of his grip in the beginning, as he remains still wont to do, and torn the first few clean in half. It’s only the most recent three that have begun to look better, even if _better _only means whole, and marred only by a minimum of unnecessary creases.

Marianne looks up from her handiwork as he curls the petals of his fourth rose, head tilted politely, voice carefully neutral. “That one looks quite pretty.”

“You don’t have to be charitable about it.”

“I’m not being charitable,” she insists, quietly, though they both know she could fold ten perfect flowers for every two halfway decent ones of his.

There’s much to do yet, before the place is ready for tomorrow—old candles in their holders all burned down, the fresh ones still in their boxes, the good tablecloths still folded in the linen cabinet in the dining hall. But there’s a ladder already stood up in one corner, to hang the garlands when they’re finished. The musicians are tuning their instruments on the other side of the hall, and the dancing’s already begun, for those who might want to get the practice in.

“If you take charge of stringing them all together, I can hang them afterward,” he says. “You ought not trust me with a needle. I used to bend them, trying to sew; Mercedes despaired of me.”

“So I’ve heard, but she tells it differently.” She doesn’t laugh, but she does permit a smile, another one of those soft and silent ones that comes alive more in her eyes than anywhere else. Dimitri finds he’s somewhat accustomed, now, to identifying the components of Marianne’s smiles; they’re rare as they’ve ever been, and retiring, and always emerge on her face with some reluctance, but perhaps he’s gotten better at looking. Now and again, through the cloud cover on an overcast day, the light comes through. “She’s always said she loves to sew with you.”

He watches her pinch a petal between two fingers and imagines her sitting next to Mercedes in their classroom, the two of them with their heads bent together, speaking in hushed voices as they wait for the morning’s lecture to begin. Side by side again at breakfast, and again in the library, turning pages soundlessly. How peculiar it is now to imagine those two might have gone the rest of the year without saying another word to one another, had one of them not taken a risk here, made a slightly different choice there. How peculiar to realize the ease with which this Marianne fits, now, into their everyday; as though she has always been a part of it, as though something had been incomplete without her.

“You are all kinder to me than I deserve,” he says, and means to leave it at that. He can’t name the thing that urges him on; a still-nameless longing that unfolds itself between his ribs, warm and insistent. To sit longer. To stay longer. To tell her more about himself. To keep doing these things forever, flowers or no flowers. “I’m not… fit for delicate work like this, really. I misjudge my strength, I break things. I have since I was a child.” This is a story he’s told many times. It’s no secret, and yet it somehow feels like one. “If you only knew, Marianne, the number of training swords I’ve snapped in two.”

“It takes its own kind of courage, I think.”

This gives him pause, makes him lift his head, but she’s creasing a fresh square of paper down the middle and not looking at him, as if to say she doesn’t expect him to listen. It feels like she means to offer him a way out, almost—the small, undemanding mercy of space.

“What does?”

“I… don’t know. Saying it, maybe. Saying what we struggle with, and continuing on anyway. Not everyone can do that.” She pauses, takes a breath. The words are tiptoeing out of her, taking shaky steps, as though she doesn’t quite believe them, or is only just learning how. “You told me something similar, once.”

Even this doesn’t exactly demand an answer. Marianne has never made him answer for himself, especially not about the parts of himself for which no answers exist. The broken parts, the ones most jagged to hold. Another small mercy: he doesn’t believe she’d begrudge him the way he fumbles for one now, searching his imagination for some oblique way of telling her that she is kind.

He never finds it. From the other end of the hall, where the music is, Annette calls to him. Her voice is ringing, echoing. “Your Highness, Felix is refusing me a waltz! Order him to dance with me, please!”

“I don’t believe in ruling by force, Annette,” says Dimitri, wryly, as Felix throws his head back, eyes visibly rolling.

“You could make the case for him, at least! Felix, one dance, please—it won’t kill you, will it!”

“Forget it—can’t you get the boar to dance with you instead—”

Their bickering recedes across the tile, becomes the patter of running feet, becomes the twanging of a lute not quite in tune. On days like this the hall feels so immense it could be its own world, the vaulted ceiling bending above them its own sky, shutting out everything else. Dimitri can imagine it will feel even more so tomorrow, lit up to the rafters and full of music, the walls covered all over with Marianne’s white roses.

What a gift it will be for all of them—for one glittering evening, the illusion of a blooming, invincible springtime.

“Annette will want you for a partner,” says Marianne. “If not now, then later. And tomorrow.”

She’s correct, of course; he has already promised one dance to Annette. Another to Dorothea of the Black Eagles, another to Claude. The soles of his boots already feel worn through, just thinking about it—not an unwelcome feeling, by any means, but he has not stopped wondering how small he and Marianne must look, in their tiny corner of this closed world. Chances are they won’t be able to sit like this for too long, tomorrow night.

“Later, then, and tomorrow. Let Felix pay his dues.” He hesitates a moment again before he tells her more, another secret that’s not a secret, another small longing he entrusts to her in confidence. She might already know this one, for all he knows; for better or for worse, he’s never been an able liar. “As it happens, I find I don’t at the moment want to be anywhere else, speaking to anyone else.”

Marianne von Edmund’s eyes still look like winter. Dimitri looks into them and sees the skies above his homeland—the pale clouds gathering, promising snow.

“How strange you are,” she says, as between her hands another white rose gently blooms.

* * *

> A happy year’s end to you, Marianne. I pray this letter finds you well, and not too sorely taxed by the celebrations.
> 
> You spoke of wishes in your last letter, and you want to know what hopes I have for myself—as the man, rather than as the king. I trust you would not hold it against me—you have never held my true feelings against me—but it shames me nevertheless to find myself confessing another fault to you in return. That fault is this: my ambitions are small. I want only happiness for those dear to me, and to see you in Fhirdiad at the turn of the Great Tree Moon.
> 
> But then again, perhaps this second wish is not so small. I do not know if your duties would allow you to travel far afield again so soon. I do not know if you would want to see the capital again, or indeed if you would welcome my company. It well may be that you and I are safer like this, thinking more fondly and more easily of one another from afar. But the truth is I wish for more than that, deeply and often. I would like you to see the youngest horses being broken in and the star magnolias beginning to bloom. I would like to give you a quiet room with an east-facing window and your run of the cathedral and the library. I would like to know if you might come to love it all, as I do.
> 
> Which is to say that I would like dearly to meet you as you are now, Marianne, in the world and not in the words. My only wish in the coming year is for a chance to know you, as you are. My only hope is that, by some miracle, for your own reasons, you might wish the same.
> 
> You say you have learned to find dancing tolerable. I would not beg a dance of you, in Faerghus or anywhere, unless it brought you joy. Simply to know you are nearby—that would be more than enough.
> 
> I remain your friend,  
Dimitri

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! The other half of this correspondence is forthcoming, uh, sometime next month, I think. 
> 
> Additional notes:
> 
> 1\. [The love letter from _Ella Enchanted_](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ella_Enchanted) helped me write this, in that it gave me a clear sense of what sort of voice I was shooting for, except not so facehidingly romantique, because such things are beyond the scope of my meager powers.
> 
> 2\. Writing awkward choir practices gave me such flashbacks to my own experiences of awkward choir practice... ["Like Cedars They Shall Stand"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0SfgBu_qKs) is an actual song I fumbled my own way through in my Catholic schoolgirl days lmfao searching my memory for a hymn with an appropriately RPGish title was a fun time
> 
> 3\. Please come cry with me about Marianne von Fire Emblem Three Houses on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/strikinglight_), if you like.


	2. as the firelight in the night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This monster, as usual, turned out to have so many more heads than I thought it would have when I set out to slay it.
> 
> Special thanks as ever to those who set out with me, especially Lark, Winny, Bent, and Gwen, for letting me cry on their shoulders. Extra thanks to Lark for giving Claude's wyvern the most undignified possible name; it's what she deserves.
> 
> I learned over the course of writing this fic that Dorte the horse is in fact male, which. Huffs. But fine, Intsys.
> 
> Did I mention in Chapter 1 that we have a playlist? [We have a playlist.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3mdfb4l64nQ78AWO0SokNM?si=-AP5ALUaSuu9SBMVIG5mnw)

_afraid, yes, but among you again  
crying yes risk joy_

_in the raw wind of the new world._  
  


_— Louise Glück, “Snowdrops”_

* * *

> Your Majesty,
> 
> You honor me with your correspondence, though I hope you will forgive my candor in admitting that it did indeed come as quite a surprise to myself and my household—by which I mean it sent us into such a state that I did not even receive your letter until the evening of the day it arrived, because Father’s aide insisted it needed to be delivered to me on the finest silver platter we own, as befits your station. Then it turned out that the platter had to be polished, and he then had to send out for polish because our last bottle had run dry, and of course the errand boy felt it necessary to tell the neighbors what it was all for. I was out for the day helping to break one of our yearlings, and therefore completely none the wiser until nightfall; I only heard about it all afterward, when I’d been presented with the evidence.
> 
> I imagine it would be like you to take such a disturbance to heart, however small, so please also allow me to tell you that I don’t mean to impose any guilt upon you. Much the opposite, in fact—if the thought of all of us tripping over ourselves can amuse you even a little as you go about your duties, then the labor of writing of it all will have been worth something. Then I will have repaid you in some small part for the joy your letter granted me, which itself was worth the commotion I arrived to, coming home from the fields that day.
> 
> Many thanks for your good wishes. I assure you I’ve been well, though my days are often busy, between answering Father’s correspondence and training horses for his merchants. It is not so different, on the whole, to be preparing them for travel and trade and not for battle—we still strive to breed in them even tempers, cool heads, the strength to carry heavy loads—but needless to say it’s a much happier thing to send these animals out into the world.
> 
> If you remember my good friend Dorte from years past, he is retired since the end of the war, and now spends most of his time at pasture. It’s a younger cousin of his by the name of Lissi that I ride now, a black mare with a white star on her forehead. She is not so tall as Dorte, but fierce for all her littleness, with a bit of a racer’s disposition; she loves a good gallop down the road into town, or around the harbor on days the streets are empty. I will be glad for her company on the road when I travel.
> 
> I too think of you, now and then, when I ride by the bay and see the blue ocean you spoke so well of. If you’ll allow me another small, candid admission, I have been afraid of it for most of my life—how large it is, how oppressive in the way the water seems to go on forever—but it has grown on me these past years, especially when I think of the friends I have still living on the other side of it. What a blessing to know that sometimes they think of me too.
> 
> If you can at all find the time, I would love to hear about how things are with you in turn—what life is like in the capital, what work you’ve been doing of late. I hear the tales the merchants bring, of course, but those are different.
> 
> Yours sincerely,  
Marianne von Edmund

* * *

The mound of collapsed marble and stone where the altar used to be looks like a wound. It hurts Marianne to look at it, worse than the overgrown flowerbeds and the half-caved-in gate, worse than the abandoned houses on the hillside, worse than the torn-up road. She counts herself lucky that Dorte had seemed to know the way home—she wouldn’t have trusted herself by half to recognize anything she saw, much less to string the sights together to form a path she might follow. A path of little wounds, each deeper than the last, and still she can’t see what might lie at the end of it. It’s only been five years. It’s already been five years.

She and Mercedes are lighting candles in the cathedral, which is as much of a substitute as they can manage for the evening prayers there’s no one around to lead. The bells are silent in the tower overhead, the stagnant air so cold Marianne’s hands are trembling, but even this must be better than doing nothing. When they entered the black steel candle holders had looked too much like the skeletons of the trees outside, bare-branched and emaciated, and sharp, too sharp. This means something different now, the small yellow flame on the end of her taper, the way it flickers as it catches one wick, and then another.

Marianne had been the last to arrive, having come the farthest, in fulfillment of the promise all of them had made to one another five years ago. Mercedes had been the first to greet her in the entrance hall, reaching out to embrace her as the blue twilight fell around them, and has barely left her side since then. It’s only now that she’s beginning to understand why, as the night deepens and the stories of the past years unspool before her eyes, and the air in the corridors feels tight, as though anticipating the footsteps of those missing from among them. Ghosts who ought to be there if only to haunt, but are not.

_Oh, Dedue, _she almost whispers. The flame blooms on the end of yet another candle, and unbidden she thinks of dandelions, the courtyard golden with them in the spring. Something stings at her eyes that is not the smoke, or the light. _I hope there are flowers where you are._

“Marianne?”

She lifts her head. “What is it?”

“Did he talk to you?”

Marianne regards Mercedes with a wrinkled brow, uncomprehending, but Mercedes seems preoccupied with staring at her own taper—not touching it to yet another candle, simply holding it in her hand as the flame dances and a bead of melting wax rolls down the length of it, not looking at her.

“Dimitri,” she clarifies, softly. “Did he talk to you?”

The flames dance, leaning together, breaking apart. In her periphery, Marianne sees shadows moving—stragglers milling about uncertainly in the darkened church. There are the soldiers standing together in pairs or loose trios, there are the monks that have only just begun returning, everything a confused pantomime of what it had been too long ago, too far away.

Even further away, there is Dimitri, standing alone in the rubble—untouched and untouchable, as if he doesn’t hear or see anything at all.

“He…” she begins. Hesitates, and begins again. “No, not really. I saw him when I arrived, in the courtyard with Professor Byleth. They… were talking, I think, a little.” Hesitates again over the memory of how Dimitri’s eye had landed on her then, so hollow and haunted it struck her cold for just a second—for no longer than a second. Then he’d turned away, and all she could see then was the shape of the regret burdening the professor’s face. Some unsaid apology, for some unknown hurt. “He didn’t say anything to me.”

There’s a sadness gathering in Mercedes’ eyes as she listens, bottomless. There are tense angles to her smile that are not part of the face in Marianne’s memory, some steel in it that the gentleness can’t mask. It never leaves, never wavers, the act of smiling itself now a duty, or a vow.

“I see,” says Mercedes. “Yes, it’s been much the same for the rest of us. I just wondered if maybe he might have, with you…” She sighs and blows the taper out—and as she does so Marianne sees her fingers tighten around it a moment, like she might snap it in half, but she doesn’t. “I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry, Marianne; he’s not what you remember.”

Marianne does not say she had heard the merchants telling stories about him in Edmund, about the prisons under the castle in Fhirdiad, about how _in Faerghus, they—the prince’s head—it’ll be over so fast—_and then the whole world had gone so still all around her, all sound reaching her through a wall of water. She’d lit one candle in the chapel at her adoptive father’s house that night, had sat in the darkness for an hour, silently rehearsing the words of one prayer only to stop, and breathe, and start another—but she hadn’t shed a single tear for him. She’d only felt the grief sitting there, tied in a tight knot at the center of her.

It was only five years ago she mourned him. It was five years ago already. The truth about the boy she still remembers remains unchanged: that he has gone silently into the dark, never to return. If nothing else, this means she is ready to mourn him again, having practiced so well.

Her mind crawls like cold honey around the image of a seat at the front of their old classroom, of a hawk-feather quill. A lancehead polished to gleaming, so bright she could glimpse her face in the silver. A hand hovering at her elbow, and dawn breaking over the hills on a night she couldn’t sleep—the first fingers of light so pale and tender through the dormitory window, and somewhere in the quiet, a voice murmuring her name.

_Marianne?_

“Well,” says Mercedes, from outside her memories. “I’m glad you came back.”

The word _glad _presses itself into her palms, and she blinks, confused, uncertain how to hold it. Mercedes can’t know about the questions that had followed her all the way here, phantoms even Dorte couldn’t outrun at her shoulder on the road, whispering _will they have you, what can you offer, do you really belong among them—_

Marianne curls her fingers in. They’re already going numb at the tips; she can feel the chill creeping down, settling between the bones. “I don’t know. I’m not sure how useful I’ll be.”

Mercedes is silent again, briefly, then lays the taper back down in the box at their feet. When she takes Marianne’s hands between both her own, it’s a surprise to find them warm—work-roughened, but so warm, and so steady, like this winter is nothing. They cover Marianne’s easily, as if to protect them.

“It’s not about useful. We’re just happy to have you nearby.” She’s still smiling. “All of us.”

“Mercie,” says Marianne, feeling suddenly small. Brittle, like the slightest movement in the air will shatter her. But Mercedes squeezes her hands, once, tightly, and she does not shatter.

“Don’t go crying on me, now,” she says. “We’ll have lots to cry about soon enough. And to laugh about, I hope, and to do. By the goddess, there’s so much to do, Marianne, my head already feels backwards. But that’s for later. For now, we have these candles, and then we can figure out all the rest.” She pauses, inhales slowly—Marianne’s breath follows hers, and settles. “Do you believe me?”

What does faith look like, she wonders, on the cusp of a war? Lighting candles, being together. Taking to a road at once familiar and not, without knowing what waits at its end. All of these things, and none of them. Marianne has not ceased to feel the ghosts of the last five years at her back, calling her through the silence to return here, to find the ones who know her name.

Mercedes carries her ghosts on her shoulders. Dimitri’s gather around him like a fortress, clinging to him, locking the living out.

“I believe you,” she says to Mercedes, and to the ruined church, too quietly to echo.

* * *

> Rain is falling over Garreg Mach as I write this, even as the sun is rising, and the view of the town beyond my window appears misted over in the dawn. A week now I have been here and this is what most of my mornings have looked like, warm and shimmering and faintly golden at the edges, the daylight landing somehow more softly on everything than I remember. The rain, too. I hear the sound of it very gently all around me, like the heartbeat of the sky, everywhere I go.
> 
> To tell you the truth, the monastery on the whole feels like evidence of a softer world. It has been so strange and lovely to see the easy way the students seem to mingle with one another across the houses, how natural it seems to them to share everything, from books to meals to seats in the classroom and space on the sparring floor. The other day they held a mock battle to commemorate the war’s end, but also a hymn recital that lasted well into the night, everyone clasping hands in the cathedral under the eye of our old professor, heads tilted heavenward as they sang. And we visitors who came here to celebrate with them—Ashe and Mercedes and Raphael and Hilda and I—did our best to add our voices to the chorus, humming when we couldn’t decipher the words and holding fast to each other’s hands, too.
> 
> Such songs they have begun writing about you in particular, Dimitri, and not a mediocre voice to sing them. I can already imagine Annette raring to memorize them all.
> 
> Are you traveling through the summer, as you said you would be? This sojourn at Garreg Mach marks the beginning of a long journey for me—from here I mean to accompany Hilda home to House Goneril, and then continue across the border to Claude in Almyra, per his invitation. It is, as you might surmise, a trip I’ll be making as much for business as for pleasure. Father has long been fascinated with Almyran wyverns, and has tasked me with studying their behavior, as well as practices of breeding and training, as thoroughly as opportunities allow. When I conveyed this to Claude, he seemed excited by the prospect. I am only hoping Lissi won’t be averse.
> 
> Hilda likes to tease me on occasion about how funny it is that I should have more than one friend I write to infrequently who just so happens to now be a king. I have come to find the whole of it amusing, how often it feels like we are all of us playing at being statesmen and diplomats, and how at the end of the day we might laugh and shed our regalia and sit down for meals in the dining hall together, like we once did.
> 
> I would have loved to see you here, though this has always been less an expectation than a hope, of course. It would have been difficult enough for all of us to come together again, even without so much still left to rebuild, and I can only imagine the burdens you shoulder every day. I am glad, though, if these letters can offer you some small respite. Throughout my time here I have still found myself seeking it in all the same places, in the cathedral and the library, underneath the one linden tree in the gardens where we used to talk. That is one thing that I can say for certain has not changed in me—a certain persistent yearning for quiet and for solitude, a desire I was convinced no one I met would ever quite understand the shape of, until you. If my solitude can sit beside yours awhile through these words, truthfully, the thought alone will be enough to bring me joy.
> 
> Ashe has kindly offered to deliver my letter to you himself once he returns to Fhirdiad. He says he will be happy to be with you again, and in turn I hope to be just that little bit more present, through him.

* * *

In the infirmary tent, there is blood on everything. The ground, the cots, the old bandages in need of changing. Marianne ought to know better than to let it faze her by now, but some part of her still fixates, refusing to numb to the sight of it.

Dimitri’s blood is on her hands, the red already drying down into a dull brown that settles like rime along the lines on her palms, in the grooves under her nails. There is an arrow in his shoulder, fletched with a feather that must also have been red once, before it saw war and did what it had been made to do. 

Marianne looks at the feather—not at the ebony shaft, long and dark and fine, or the wound at the end of it—and lifts her hands, whispering a numbing spell. 

“Don’t waste your breath,” Dimitri tells her, through gritted teeth, before she can finish. “Just get it out, and have done with it.”

Dimitri’s back is more scar tissue than skin, almost, like a second coat of armor grafted onto the living flesh beneath. She had seen the arrow catch him from behind with her own eyes, and yet he’d done little more than turn his head. For one brief, terrifying second, she had thought him half about to tear it from his body, then and there, but in the end he’d only hefted his lance and kept running.

Marianne bites her lip, and the light at her fingertips dies. She sets her palm against his unwounded shoulder, flat along the ridge of bone. “I’ll need to cut at the area around the wound to excise the arrowhead. It’s going to be very painful.”

“Do you think you have time to dawdle here coddling me?” He tilts his head back, regarding her through one piercing eye. “Pain is nothing. Do it now.”

It’s cruel because it’s true. Already she can hear one of the men stirring in a bed nearby, murmuring _goddess, _murmuring _water. _Out of the corner of her eye she sees Manuela cleaning a scalpel, remembers that must have been the first lesson she ever taught them on the field:_ You can get a lot of healing done by magic, I’ll grant you, but some things still require the work of your hands._

He’s quiet when she cuts out the arrowhead, irrigates the wound with clean water and stitches it closed. The magic is what comes after, spells to burn it clean and protect it from infection, and he makes not a sound through that too. She wonders if she might be able to bear it better when they scream. 

“It’s not nothing, Your Highness,” she says to his back, when it is all finished. The words sound removed from her, and hollow when set against the narrative of scars she can still see inscribed on his flesh, and yet some force she can’t identify pushes them out of her all the same. “If you saw the things we see here every day, pain would have meaning to you.”

“You think so? And what horrors does a healer see?”

The sound of the word _healer, _from that mouth, in that voice, is caustic enough to make her flinch. It is not so different from the voices she still hears now and then in her nightmares, calling to her from inside of a dark forest, in the places where the shadows are thickest. They tell her the same things they have always told her: that she is weak because she was born to weakness, that a weak heart cannot truly heal another, cannot help but let the monsters win.

_The evil is poured out, _the professor had said, a steady hand on her shoulder as they stood together at the mouth of that forest, one turn of the moon ago. _You’re free now, Marianne. _

“You would not understand them,” says Marianne, because there are some things she, too, still needs to fight to believe. “Not as you are.”

Dimitri says nothing as he pulls his discarded shirt back over his head, unmindful of the way the bandages stretch over his injury. There’s a ripple of tension in the air as he breathes out, a sigh that turns halfway into a scoff.

“I thank you for all you do for us, Marianne, but keep that gentle heart of yours for yourself.” He rises and steps past her, close enough to touch. “You waste it needlessly on me and my kind.”

She doesn’t watch him leave. There is, as ever, too much work to do—water to fetch for the man in the cot, whose face is crimson with fever, and a clean needle for Mercedes, and more bandages. And yet more. It never ends.

The sun is sinking in the western sky by the time she manages at last to slip away to the supply tent, to steal some peace for herself. She can allow herself to sit if it’s in the guise of attending to more work; there’s ointment that needs making, the mortar and pestle standing ready on the table at the back, but a quick survey of the crate beside it reveals they’re out of one key herb.

“Marianne.”

When she turns her head, Dedue is there, a bushel of wild oregano bound with twine in his hand. The tent appears to shrink around him, as the world itself has seemed to do since he found his way back to them at the Great Bridge of Myrddin a sennight past, unable to comprehend his return. More times than she can count now Marianne has seen him stirring a soup pot in the mess tent, or carrying boxes for Mercedes as they hurry together from one edge of the camp to the other, and yet each time the very real sight of his face has left her frozen, unable to speak.

“Dedue.” Her throat closes, right on cue, shamefully. She still remembers too well what it had felt like to believe that she would never see him again; the ghost of that belief still has a hand around her neck now, holding tightly, refusing to relinquish her breath. “It’s been too long.”

Dedue does not smile—that’s one thing, she thinks, that tells her he is real and not a walking phantom, how little that face of his still is given to smiling—but he does come to sit in the empty chair beside her, laying the herbs down. She knows he means to spare her any more shame when he chooses to dispense with pleasantries, saying only, “I heard you might be needing more of this.”

“Yes, you saved me. Good herbs are hard to come by these days.” She undoes the knot in the twine, separating out a small cluster of stems from which she then begins to strip the leaves, dropping them clump by clump into the bowl.

“The ground is harsh this time of year,” says Dedue. The fragrance of the oregano rises between them, alive and earthy and green, and his familiar stony expression seems to soften as he breathes. “Keeping herbs overwinter is difficult even in greenhouses, but wild variants are hardier. It’s not impossible to gather a good yield, if one knows where to look.”

Marianne thinks then about the flowerbeds back at the monastery, about tending them with him as they used to in the old days, about how it feels to sink her hands nearly to the wrists in soft, dark earth. She thinks about living things. Then she blinks, closing her fingers tight about the pestle, surprised that her eyes are wet. 

“It has been difficult, but the snowdrops are doing well. We might even find them blooming if—when we return.”

“I have no doubt of it. They must be growing strong.” He turns his face away from her, toward the wall, gaze leveled on the featureless canvas. “As you are.”

Marianne bows her head, exhales through her lips. The wet on her eyelashes has begun making its way down her cheeks, slowly, dripping soundlessly into the bowl. “Am I? I’m only doing what I can.”

“In hard times, that is strength enough.” The silence that follows feels thick, charged in a way she recognizes—the sound of someone taking care about what they say next, and what they don’t. “Everyone who sees you can see it, Marianne.”

A boy she used to know had told her a similar thing, five years ago, in another version of the world: _It takes its own kind of courage. Not everyone can do it. _But here, in this tiny tent that smells of herbs and drying blood and white magic, it’s hard to feel any kind of courageous. Here she’s learned more about what bodies are made of than she’s ever wished to know—how soft human flesh can be, under all that armor, how easily destroyed. Before noon tomorrow they will arrive at Gronder Field, and she will learn these things all over again.

“I’m going to ruin the ointment, Dedue.”

“Never,” he says, without hesitation, as if he can’t see how her shoulders have begun to tremble. “Salt is purifying. You know this.”

In Garreg Mach, far away, the bells in the cathedral should be sounding the evening call to prayer. She can only hope that the last of the doves will come home to roost in the rafters, seeking shelter from the coming night.

* * *

> Your last letter did reach me at Hilda’s. She gave me grief about it all night, telling me I’d been too indulgent of you and that I would have been within my rights to scold you at least a little for not joining us. I’m sure this doesn’t surprise you in the least; Hilda is one of those things that never changes, really, and I do love her for it when all is said and done.
> 
> I am learning so much, living out the fall in Almyra. The pine forests that border Fódlan to the east cast the densest shadows I have ever seen, and the land beyond it is breathtaking to behold, all sprawling plains and jagged mountain ranges along the horizon. The people the land breeds are as fierce as you would expect, and as proud, but unsparing in their hospitality toward those who have earned their trust. They value plain speech and steady gazes, and the Almyran nobles make a sport of arguing with their king. They do so often, at great length and with great spirit, but also with so much laughter the palace halls are constantly ringing with it.
> 
> Claude sends you his regards, from the seat across mine in the library. He bears the burdens of kingship in ways that make all the sense in the world for someone like him: by smiling easily and cracking jokes at inopportune moments, and catching all his ministers off guard in the process. Underneath all that, as ever, he pays the keenest attention to those under his care. He’s always known, for instance, that I do better with animals than I do with people, and so introduced me to his wyvern Buttercup before any other member of his court, reasoning that if they saw her warm to me, the rest would follow.
> 
> He asks me about you, frequently. It amused him a great deal to hear you are visiting Brigid, and he has been wondering if autumn on the islands is warm enough to make you shed those heavy furs of yours and swim in the sea. For my own part, whatever you might be doing and however you might be dressed, I only pray that your time there will give you some measure of peace to keep for yourself. That there you will find kindness, and friendship, and time and space enough to see to your own care, and that you will return to Faerghus with your spirit refreshed.
> 
> It has done me good to come here, I think. Years ago, I never would have been able to fathom traveling from place to place so freely like this—a world that would permit it seemed so alien to me then, and a version of me that could do it even more so. I don’t do so without fear, of course, even now, but I am discovering every day that there is also so much wonder to be found, in such surprising places. I often wish I could tell this to the person I used to be: that there is no way she could have envisioned the kind of person she would become, having changed as the world around her continues to change.
> 
> When next I write to you, it will likely be from home. I anticipate there will be yet more work waiting for us both when we finally return. The year-end celebrations are always grand in my adoptive father’s house, and I will likely have to help him organize the banquets and muster the household. When you return to Fhirdiad, I’m sure, similar matters will probably be demanding your attention on a much larger scale. I have faith, of course, that you will rise to meet whatever comes. I promise you I will strive to do the same.
> 
> Lissi has been a veritable soldier on the march, but she is missing her pasture after so long away, and I too want to see my room again. It faces east, in the direction of the harbor, and most mornings I wake early to watch the sun rise, so that I can see the way it turns the sky and water both a color I have never seen anywhere else, somewhere between golden and blue. It is yet another thing I have seen that I wish I could enclose in an envelope and send to you, like Almyra’s pine forests and the songs of its wyverns. I am collecting so many of those things, these days, and regret deeply that I have so few ways to truly share them, but perhaps we might find some refuge in the things we are able to help each other imagine.
> 
> Be assured that I have kept you in my prayers every day, between one letter and the next. I bless your roads, and the skies you ride under, and the city you will come home to, all from my heart.

* * *

Marianne tells herself she’s not given to weeping. It used to be that she believed it was her only virtue—the least she could do, to spare others the inconvenience of seeing her tears. She had not cried before the two empty coffins on the day of her parents’ funeral, not ever in her room at Garreg Mach, not in the woods before Maurice’s bones. She oughtn’t cry today, on what is supposed to be a happy occasion, but her mind feels leaden, unable to catch up to her body. Despite her best efforts, her fingertips touch her cheek and already come away wet.

Castle Fhirdiad is huge, the air freezing, the stone walls and floors so bare they magnify every sound. She doesn’t have it in her to walk far, unable to bear the way her steps echo, and eventually the fear of losing her way overrides the desire to be alone. The shadowy space under the staircase in the hall below the balcony isn’t ideal, but the whole castle is preoccupied with Dimitri’s presentation, and no one is coming and going on this side, at least for now.

There’s a sound building between her ribs, a sharp splintering noise she can’t breathe around. This, too, seems to resound horribly when she releases it. There’s nothing she can do but cover her face with her hands.

She had told Annette—something, something vague about just needing some air, when in truth she had been unable to watch the way Dimitri had bowed his head and wept, the crowds below, how the professor had set a hand upon his back to steady him. She had had no choice but to go back the way they came, up the corridor and down the stairs, walking as quickly as she dared. Eyes on the floor, hands fisted in her skirts to keep them from dragging on the stone, counting her steps in time to an imaginary marching drum, so as not to think about anything else. _Left, right, left, right…_

She doesn’t know how many minutes pass before she hears a sound behind her—a quiet breath, the catch in it accidental. She wipes her face on her sleeve before she looks back over her shoulder, feels her knees suddenly buckle when she does.

“I’m sorry.” It’s the first thing that comes to mind, the product of some senseless impulse, the fear that saying the wrong word will split her in half. “I—”

Dimitri stands in the curve of shadow where the staircase turns. He approaches her slowly, ducking his head down under the overhang, one hand up as if to shield it, and for a moment Marianne can’t see his face. She watches his shoulders tense as he lifts his head, rises cautiously to full height again.

“Gilbert says there ought to be feasting tonight.” His voice is low and still a little hoarse, and the words land more heavily than they should, bowed under the weight of some unspoken shame. There’s a redness yet to fade from the corner of his right eye.

“Naturally,” she says. A stronger person would probably pull up a smile, if only to diffuse the tension; the most she can manage is to scrub at her cheek with the back of one hand, to erase the worst of the evidence. “I’m sorry; I shouldn’t be here.”

“Not at all,” Dimitri tells her. “I used to cry here all the time as a boy.”

“Is that right?” Marianne doesn’t recognize the sound that comes out of her—a breath of laughter that turns halfway through into a sob, ragged at the edges. It’s not a loud sound, but it makes her whole body tremble. “What would you cry about?”

“Little things. A broken sword, a nightmare. A beloved dog dying. Grief was so simple then.” He looks down at his feet, at the toes of his boots facing the hem of her skirt across the stone floor. “What are you grieving, Marianne? I would bear it with you, if you allowed me.”

_You, _she almost says. She’d sewn up the stab wound in his back at Gronder Field, and no more than one hour later she had watched him light the funeral pyre for Rodrigue. No more than one moon later she had stood by with the others as he walked into the light on the balcony in the castle where he was born. All of it had seemed to happen so quickly, and yet she had been the only one among them who couldn’t smile to see him finally home again—the grief entangling with pride, entangling with joy, and presiding over all of it a persistent, numbing exhaustion at how long it had taken them to arrive. How hard-won the space to feel had been, and still is. _All of us._

“The things…” she starts, but her voice cracks, aborting itself in the middle. She does not wait before repeating it. “The things a healer sees, I suppose.”

“Oh, Marianne.” She sees his face change—the widening eye, the twist of the mouth. He’s silent for a long time, listening to nothing, before he breathes out in one long and noiseless _ah._ “I hurt you very badly, didn’t I?”

That is one part of it she can’t deny. His words have had a way of burying themselves in all the way to the hilt, leaving the sort of scar that twinges whenever she walks too fast, or breathes too deeply, the ache running like a bright red thread through every motion. She doesn’t know yet what the shape of her forgiveness is.

“You died,” she blurts out, at last, too tired to try and soften it. As if to say the hands of the dead lie heavy on her shoulders too. As if to say he has never been alone in this, all this time. “And then you came back—died, and came back. That’s what it felt like. Dimitri, we’ve been mourning you so long.”

“After all I’ve done, I don’t deserve to be mourned. Least of all by you.”

“It’s not about deserving,” she says. “Or even about forgiveness. All we can do is live with the fact that we’re alive.” And then, more softly, the way she had once tried to tell him the meaning of pain, she adds, “Don’t treat it like a waste anymore.”

It’s the smallest fraction of the things she wants to say to him. There is still what remains of the war ahead of them, looming so large she can hardly stand to look at it, and she is still learning to talk to this Dimitri, who speaks and stands and breathes again a little more like a living person—rough-hewn and scarred and weary, but awake. She has not learned the words yet for all the rest, and so when this Dimitri opens his hands for hers, she only hesitates a second before she gives them. He might well crush every bone in those hands, easily, but she gives them.

“You, too, sound as though you’ve died and been reborn.” The wonder in his voice is plain to hear, and the sadness that sits beside it, like he regrets not being there for her becoming. He runs a thumb over the ridges of her knuckles, featherlike. “Who are you? How lucky that I can meet you again.”

Marianne looks up into his face and feels her heart stutter. She can’t deny the part of her that even now is still waiting to see when it will give out, decide it’s had enough. And yet somehow the next beat is there for her, and the one after, and the one after—continuing.

“I’m just me,” she says, “and so are you. And we are still—we’re both still here.”

“So we are,” says Dimitri, as they breathe together. He does not let go of her hands.

* * *

> The merchants have been coming home with stories of the celebrations in Fhirdiad, and by all counts they have sounded as though they were very lovely—the bread bountiful and the wine flowing, and the music loud and lively and perfect for dancing, all through the night. It’s as much as your people deserve at the end of their second year of peace. I hope you gave Annette the dances you promised her, and that her company and that of others close to you has given you back some measure of the joy you so dearly wish to impart.
> 
> I have learned to find dancing tolerable, myself, though I can only just manage the motions and therefore probably don’t make a very exciting partner. We had something of a dance here at Father’s house a few nights ago, and will likely have at least one other before the year is out, though at such things I find myself only once or twice on the floor. Overseeing the proceedings on his behalf keeps me busy for most of the evening, as does answering questions from his friends and associates about you, and by the time we see the last guest off I am all but falling asleep on my feet.
> 
> When people hear I am a friend to the king and ask what that is like—what you are like—what springs to mind immediately is a growing list of things I cannot tell them. I cannot tell them of your love for horses, or that you are only recently beginning to taste your food again, or that you grow bashful when asked to talk about yourself. I can’t tell them anything about you that I feel is worth knowing, because I don’t sense these are things they wish to learn. Perhaps we’ve split ourselves this way over the years, more and more, the more people we meet and responsibilities we take on; perhaps this is only the price we pay for growing up.
> 
> Since receiving your last letter, I have been thinking at length about something Dedue once told me, the one thing about you that I am most loath to share with others whom I am not certain will understand—that you are tenderhearted for a king. That you feel deeply and think much, especially about the weak and the dead, and that you do not know how to forget. That these are all at once your faults and your virtues. Please trust that I understand this, Dimitri, if you are so determined that I should see every part of you, including the shadows. There is no need to force yourself to smile if all is not well with your soul. There is nothing you need seek my forgiveness for; not for your honesty or for your dishonesty, or for the disclosures that look like weakness to you from where you are standing. You have never made me feel, likewise, as though there is any cause for shame in being the kind of person I am.
> 
> It’s tradition here in the east to talk much around the dining table about our wishes and hopes, as the year draws to a close. If I may confess a weakness to you in turn, it’s that all throughout my girlhood I had no idea what to say, because I had no hope. No sense of what I should want, or what I deserved. I am not so changed that I no longer feel this now; the question of deserving still crosses my mind from time to time, and the pang is as keen as it’s ever been. I still wonder, as I told you once before, why the Goddess allows me to live, and if it might be selfish to now be nurturing wishes of my own. If striving for the fulfillment of these wishes, for myself and others, suffices to measure the worth of a life. I don’t feel much closer to the answers these days, not particularly, but I am trying to be gentler to myself as I search for them, and as I carry on.
> 
> What are your desires, Dimitri, just as a person? As a king I can guess at the things you might want, for your people and for the land—continued peace and prosperity, growth and strength and the resilience it will take to weather whatever coming storms. But what of Dimitri, whom I know but cannot speak about?
> 
> I will tell you one of mine: your happiness. Your true happiness, in Garreg Mach or anywhere, in whatever time and place would nurture it best. That is, at the moment, my foremost wish. The others I will hold until I can tell you about them face to face, hopefully one day soon.

* * *

“The ocean is so temperate here in the east,” says Dimitri, from the edge of the pier at Derdriu. “I’ve never seen water so calm before.”

Dusk is falling, and in the red-orange glow of the summer evening the ships are coming in like a flock of gulls on the wing, carrying the people home to their city. Going the other way, toward the unknowable place where the horizon descends into the sea, there is only one—a tall galleon with white sails.

Marianne watches that one ship from where she stands beside him, the two of them encased in the quiet of a long day ending. Everything moves slower, breathes more softly in the twilight, as though this city had not seen battle in the afternoon, as though the soldiers of Faerghus were not at this very moment still scrubbing blood from the stones of the street. They’re to camp in Derdriu for the night before they begin the march to the imperial capital at Enbarr, where everything will end, one way or another. For today, their reward is this strange and tenuous peace, the kind built only to last until morning.

“It’s calm now,” she says, “but the weather can change it so quickly, especially in the summer. You never know what it will do.”

Dimitri hums, thoughtful. “So it’s a bit like Claude, then.”

“Maybe more than a bit,” says Marianne, and there’s a trace of a smile in it that surprises her, emerging despite herself and the day’s fatigue. “You know what he’s like.”

Claude is aboard the one ship, of course, and can’t hear them—sailing away to some unknown place, in pursuit of a dream he’d elected not to share. It shouldn’t have been surprising, the way he’d smiled and kept his secrets, eyes dancing as he said farewell. Typical Claude, to take so much pleasure in making them watch him leave.

“Do I?” Dimitri asks her, and it’s clear that he means to say he knows as much about Claude as about the movement of the sea in summertime, about the unseen storms that can gather and swell over the open water, without warning. “I can’t tell sometimes, what he’s like. Moreover, he knows more about me than I care to admit.”

“Thank the goddess for that,” she whispers, not looking at him, one hand tightening around the other.

The light is leaving the Western sky faster even than Claude’s white-winged galleon; already the red is dispersing, the sky fading into a muted gold now, streaked with purple. Marianne sees Dimitri’s expression grow pensive for a moment as he watches it, shuttering up, becoming inscrutable. She waits, and a scale tips.

“If I had said we shouldn’t come,” he begins, slowly, and his hesitation seems to thicken the air between them, “if I had pushed the march to Enbarr—and we left Derdriu to burn, what would you have done?” His voice staggers, then steadies. “Would you have hated me then?”

It’s not an easy question to answer, even if she feels the denial rise in the back of her throat before she can even search for it: _No, of course not, I could never. _It would certainly be the easy thing to say, just as it would be easy to profess her faith. But the truth is that this had felt like the sort of choice that might split the world in two, and that she had not presumed to guess what he would choose until it was made; that she had held her breath until she heard him give the order.

“I… don’t know,” she says, at last. “We can’t say now, because it didn’t happen.”

Maybe there is a world in which he lets Claude die, and maybe that world is also the one in which she withholds her forgiveness. It’s entirely like Dimitri to still be concerned, if only in his imagination, with the possibilities of that world, but she is more than satisfied with laying them aside and knowing she does not have to consider them, ever again.

In this world, she is turning over the memory of how mere hours ago Hilda had beamed and kissed her on both cheeks before she stepped aboard the one ship, had exclaimed _ah, look at you, Marianne! _as if she had made some great discovery. How Claude had clasped Dimitri’s hand before he opened his arms for her like a question, how easy it had been to go into them and let him squeeze the breath from her body for one brilliant, dreamlike instant. How the illusion of Garreg Mach had seemed to shimmer before them, all of them momentarily caught in the sunlight, unwilling to let go of one another.

_You’ve got to live long enough to visit me when the war’s over,_ Claude had said, holding her by the shoulders and laughing. He had only laughed louder when she asked where she might find him, his eyes full of riddles when he’d answered, _I’ll be at home, my friend. Find me there._

Now, Dimitri is closer beside her than the future, closer even than the battles that wait for them on the other side of this night. Still here. His chest rises and falls in time with the waves when he breathes. “I wonder if I might confide something in you, Marianne.”

Her eyes leave the water then, settle on his face gently, unhesitating. “Of course.”

“I’m not certain if you saw it, but something happened, earlier, when I put myself between Claude and the archer battalion. I felt… something go cold in me, and I could hear my heart beating.” Dimitri frowns at this even as he says it, like the memory confuses him, its sensations already fading, no more than a few hours old. “I remember thinking that I needed to live, as much as I needed him to live. Both at once.”

She had seen it, from the landward side of the wide and bloodstained bridge—a dozen bows drawn, arrows like ravens. The arc of Dimitri’s lance. How Claude’s wyvern had beat her wings and screamed. Now that he is telling her what it was like, she wonders if she might recognize the feeling. She can certainly identify the parts of it: the fear, and the well of desperate strength on the other side, and the need that she has only begun learning how to believe. _I needed to live._

“I think that’s what fear is for.”

“Isn’t it odd? Suddenly I want there to be… something after this. To go home to Fhirdiad, and for all of us to meet again.” He pauses here, watching her face for a reaction, before he asks, “Is there anything you want to do, Marianne, when the war is over?”

“That sounds like a dangerous question,” she says, if only to hide the fact that the danger is in the way it’s made the breath inside her tighten, this notion of wanting.

“Maybe it is,” he admits, but doesn’t retract it. “It’s just—if there is something you wish for, I would like to help you claim it, if I can. Regardless.”

Marianne feels the heart inside her swell, like the tide, without warning.

“I… want to live to retire Dorte. And to learn things about horses that have nothing to do with war—breeding and training, things like that.” These are wishes she has never told anyone about. Possibly they are wishes she had not known she had until someone came to ask about them, inviting her to set them to words. “And to travel, if I’m up to it. See more of the world.”

Something about what she says makes him smile, his face half-shadowed now by the dusk. “Would you go across the ocean?”

If there is a second question, folded up and tucked into the first like a secret, he does not make her look at it. If there is more to her small collection of wishes, some dream left unarticulated, she does not make him look at it. On the other side of the horizon, she can still hear Claude, his own dream folded up and slipped sideways up his sleeve before either of them can so much as catch a glimpse: _I can’t tell you what it is before I make it come true._

“Maybe, for a time,” she says, and it might be the bravest thing she has ever said. It might be the only brave thing she has ever said. “And then I’d come back.”

* * *

> Dear Claude,
> 
> Before I left Almyra last fall, you had me make you a rather cryptic promise: that the next time I had cause to depart Edmund on a long journey, I would send you a letter at the end of it, that you might be happy for me. I did not fully understand what you meant then, and am only just beginning to make sense of it now, but let this serve as my attempt to make good on that promise.
> 
> I write you now from Fhirdiad. I will be here until the end of the Great Tree Moon as a guest of the king, having accepted an invitation he extended to me at year’s end. On the first day of the new year I rode for Faerghus from my father’s house with a small escort, because the skies were clear and I could not abide going by carriage, and arrived in Fhirdiad this morning, not long after sunrise. In spite of the early hour, I found that Dedue had ridden out to meet me at the entrance to the city, almost as though he had been waiting—and thank the goddess, honestly, that he was kind enough to lend me his arm, as my knees were shaking fit to give out as soon as I dismounted.
> 
> As for our meeting, please believe me when I say there is little to tell, much as you insisted that when the time came I should repeat back to you every detail. Dimitri looks well, if weary. He was wearing blue when he came to greet me; not the bright royal blue of the Blue Lion house, but a softer, more subdued color, bordering grey. He has made a practice of tying his hair back since the end of the war, but he eschews wearing the crown on all but the most formal of occasions, I am told. When I bowed and offered my hand to him in greeting, he held it between both of his for a long while, saying nothing—later saying only, ‘Welcome to my home, Marianne.’ He still stands the same, still sounds the same.
> 
> What else can I tell you? I have settled now into a room in the east wing of the castle, with a window that looks out onto the garden. I have Dimitri’s promise that we will dine together tonight with Ashe and Annette, and Ingrid if she can be persuaded to leave the training yard. Dedue has been at my side for most of the day, making sure I lack for nothing, showing me the way to places that might interest me. Thus far I have seen the chapel and the library, and the little flowerbed out back that he tends in his free hours. Most of his precious plants are sleeping still, but a few have already sensed winter’s end and begun to raise their heads—the snowdrops, and the crocuses, and the lilies of the valley. It does my heart good to see them, just as it does my heart good to remember I am among friends here, who will see to it that my every need is met even as I repeatedly insist I don’t need much. I am happy, truly, just to be nearby.
> 
> I haven’t forgotten that I made you a second promise: that having arrived here I would at least try to tell you, in as clear terms as I could manage, how I felt. How I am now feeling, given everything. I’ve struggled all my life with putting my feelings into words—in part because I have always doubted that they deserve articulation, but in greater part because the words themselves are always failing me. I am too weak to hold them well, too easily rendered speechless. And yet I promised you I would try, knowing this, so all I can do is trust you will find something worthy in the trying. I might struggle at my writing desk an hour to eke out a single barely coherent sentence, but perhaps you will simply smile to read it and say, ‘Ah, yes, I knew it all along!’
> 
> Being so near him again makes me nervous, Claude. But it also makes me calm. So very calm, calmer than I ever remember feeling elsewhere, in anyone else’s company. Calm like how the goddess must be calm, do you know, Claude? Calm from loving.
> 
> It probably does not surprise you to learn that I love him. For all I know, this is another thing that makes you laugh because you, in your infinite wisdom, have been aware of it from the very beginning. But seeing the fact of it so plainly stated surprises me every day. It would still surprise him to learn it, I am certain of it. This is the reason I find myself in no especial rush to tell him—there is time enough now for both of us to be surprised, time enough to discover what new things all of this can mean, now that we are both alive here.
> 
> Please give Buttercup all my affection. You have my permission to tell her of my foolishness—I trust that she at least will be good enough not to tease me about it later, but neither can I begrudge you any of your amusement at my expense. Be well, my dear friend. When next we meet, I will be the first to fill my glass to you.
> 
> Yours,  
Marianne

* * *

In the end, Marianne finds Dimitri at the foot of the steps leading down to the fishing pond. It must be close to midnight, but the monastery is nowhere near as dark as it could be, illuminated by a rising moon—and by so many candles, so many torches it’s as if they mean to try and eclipse the sun. The glow filtering through the open doors of the dining hall seems to reach out for him, faintly gilding the slope of his back, the line of one shoulder, the rest of him sitting in the shadows just beyond.

He turns his head to look up at her as she descends the steps, leaving that light behind, and the music too. Something about the sight of her makes him smile immediately, and his face remembers the motions for it so readily now it twists at the heart in her chest a little to see.

“Are you much for fishing, Marianne?” he asks, as she gathers her skirts and sits down beside him.

“Oh, no, I was never very good at it.” The sentiment lands differently than it used to, the words no longer so sad and leaden. Easier to let go of and watch disperse into the night air—and how quickly they disappear, now, as though she had never said them. “The sitting and the waiting I can do, but I’m too slow when the bite comes.”

“Fair enough,” says Dimitri. “I never did quite get the hang of it myself. I just like how quiet the water can be.”

Garreg Mach in the fall is already cold—not so cold as the fortresses of the north, Marianne knows now, but cold enough that when the wind rises and sighs around them it makes her wrap her arms around herself, shivering. Cold enough that when Dimitri sheds the cape around his shoulders and offers it to her, she forgets it’s in her nature to refuse.

He looks smaller like this, uncloaked and divested of his armor, suddenly now more a person than a storm. The tunic he wears is grey, or perhaps a muted blue, buttoned at the throat with silver—some soft and solemn color that’s hard to place in the low light. The color of a rare bright day in winter, after the snows have settled and the pale sun emerged, if only for an afternoon.

“Do you not feel a chill?” The cape, she discovers when she pulls it around herself, is large enough to surround her whole body twice over, the folds of it spilling into her lap and pooling on the stone steps.

“You needn’t worry for me. I’ve always thought autumns in Garreg Mach feel rather more like Faerghus summers.” Dimitri’s gaze drifts away from her, down toward the ground. “Dedue used to fret about finding frost on his flowers as early as the Horsebow Moon.”

Marianne follows that gaze with her own. Not for the first time, her memory takes hold of the word _Faerghus, _and then of the way his voice softens around it, the helpless tenderness there. “You must miss it.”

“With all my heart. It’s a terror of a place in some ways—so harsh you practically have to beg flowers to grow, and the cold never truly leaves it, no matter the month. But it’s part of me.” He’s quiet awhile, as though measuring up the weight of this admission, before he asks, “Will you be happy to be home?”

Marianne’s fingers curl in the fabric of Dimitri’s cape. It’s a different shade of blue than the tunic he wears, richer and deeper—blue like a familiar ocean. Blue like Edmund Greatport in the springtime, when the ships come in. She can’t say now that she misses it, but she sees it all so clearly, all the same.

“Maybe. I never thought of it as that before, exactly. It was just… a place I ended up.”

“Is that so?” Dimitri inclines his head toward her, sidelong, the gesture itself another familiar thing now, having become one without her noticing. A little curious, a little knowing, like he can already see her answer, or at least its shape. “Surprising, sometimes, the places we end up.”

_Surprising _is one word for it. Marianne’s dreams on the march had been full of those places—of Fhirdiad and how Dimitri had looked in the light there, on the high balcony, tears on his face. Of the white walls of Enbarr, gleaming. Of Gronder Field in the rain.

This, though, must be the strangest dream she has ever had, herself and Dimitri sitting together at Garreg Mach for what is possibly the last time. Or at least, the last time for a long time. Already her mind seems to be running ahead, preparing for the body’s waking—her memory closing like water around the image of the still pond, the ripple of lute-strings, the way the breezes blow his hair into his face and turn it impossible. She thinks again of Edmund, and the arms of the sea around the harbor, and for a brief moment finds she can imagine what it would be like to miss it.

This evening, Dimitri had been the center of everything until he hadn’t. She can’t tell now at what point he had slipped away; somewhere in between someone taking out a lute, and someone else clapping their hands and beginning to sing. She had not followed him so much as let the night pull her outside, overwhelmed by the abundance of life one room could hold.

“Are you to ride out early tomorrow morning?” she asks.

“Perhaps. Ingrid wanted to leave at dawn, but it will depend on how quick to rise the others are, after tonight.” Dimitri smiles, no doubt already amused by thoughts of his friends: Felix already in the saddle, Ingrid dragging Sylvain half-staggering from his bed, rumpled and bleary-eyed. Then he comes back to her, eyes settling on her face the same way she’s often seen him train them on the sky—as if there is a language in it that he can read if he tries, encoded in colors, and cloud-shapes, and angles of light. “And you?”

“I was meaning to, yes,” says Marianne. There had been a letter waiting for her upon their return from Enbarr, asking much the same thing. “My adoptive father expects me back soonest. There’s a lot of work to be done.”

“There is, isn’t there?” he murmurs, perhaps more to himself than anything, still smiling. “Well, you’ll be brilliant, I’m sure.”

The word _brilliant _arrests her so completely for a moment that she can’t even think to hide; it makes her look down at her lap, at her folded hands, her cheeks suddenly warm. “So will you, Your Majesty.”

She doesn’t mean to tease or embarrass him—indeed it’s the furthest thing from a joke to her—but that’s what seems to happen anyway, from the way he ducks his head down. The sound that escapes from behind his lips then is one she can’t quite identify. Something quiet and amused, just shy of a real laugh.

“Please, Marianne. To tell you the truth, I can still scarcely believe it. Felix says I won’t believe it until the crown is on my head, and possibly not even then.”

She could say that she believes it, easily. She can already picture the coronation day, the crowds in the streets at Fhirdiad. The love and labor of it all, with ever more to come. But these are things she doesn’t need to tell him, out here, with their old monastery still standing around them, and all the life in it. There will be time enough, later, for everything she imagines to become as real as this.

The wind picks up again, and for some reason Dimitri moves with it, leaning close as if to shield her from the cold. When Marianne looks up at his face again, he’s angled it away, staring determinedly down into the shadows at his feet.

“Marianne,” he says. The silence that follows it stretches on so long it renders the sound of her name alien to her for a while—as if the word itself is enough, as if it could ever be enough. Then a sound from behind them seems to jar him—a note on the flute gone sharp, Ashe half-laughing _so fill to me the parting glass_—and Dimitri seems to remember, and continues.

“I know I should be looking to the future, but for what it might be worth… I don’t imagine I have it in me to forget anything, either. This place. All that we did here, and all that we fought for.” His voice softens. “And you—that you were here, are here with us tonight.”

He trails off at the end, the words fading to a whisper, but Marianne catches hold of them before the wind can. She might not yet know what to do with them, but she already knows that later she will hold them against her heart, the better to keep when everything else is gone. Just these words like candles to see her way by, and Dimitri breathing beside her, and the echo of dear voices lifted in song, so near and so luminous: _I’ll gently rise and softly call, good night and joy be to you all—_

“How strange you are,” she tells him, at last. Here, now, with his cape around her shoulders and her right hand coming to rest in his left at the end of this last, this longest of journeys.

When Dimitri lifts that hand and presses it to his lips, that is one breath she again forgets to disbelieve. When he lowers it again, he does not let it go. A second breath.

“It’s late,” he says, “and you at least are sure to have an early morning—but will you stay for just one more song?”

One more song, and yet how easily it might become another, and another. As easily as her face welcomes a smile, watching him rise. As easily as she allows herself to follow.

“Just one more song,” Marianne tells the night, before the shadows fall behind them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please cry with me about the notion of final-postwar-farewell-party-at-Garreg-Mach-before-your-house-of-choice-finally-separates-to-rebuild-the-world set to a version of "The Parting Glass" also of your choice, thank you. [The Cara Dillon version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKpda9KVRXI) is my personal favorite, but also [this one.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj57O8H7lfw)
> 
> Give Marianne von Fire Emblem all the friends 2k19. Thank you. And thank you for reading!


End file.
